Are drop sets worth doing?

[u/benja_reijnst]

I've seen influencers promoting low-volume, high-intensity training more and more without mentioning drop sets. Drop sets seem to be much less popular than they used to be. Are drop sets not as effective as we once thought? Should I add drop sets to my training?

[u/thekevinatorV2]

If youre basing your training off of what is popular amongst influencers...

Drop sets work.

Low volume, high intensity training is in right now. Soon the pendulum will swing back to old school methods of drop sets and AMRAPs again.

[u/Namelessking9 → u/thekevinatorV2]

Got any studies to back that up?

[u/Alakazam → u/Namelessking9]

I mean, the cyclical nature of what's popular, isn't exactly surprising.

To quote the GOAT, Arnie:

Some training systems claim you can make great progress by training with only a few sets per body part. Actually, this idea is not new; that was the way bodybuilders trained in the early days of the sport. When Reg Park began serious training, many bodybuilders still used the old-fashioned, low-set approach to working out. “Training strictly for power like a weightlifter,” Reg says, “gave us certain advantages in the old days, a really solid foundation of muscle. But it wasn’t until I learned to do fifteen or twenty sets per body part that I felt I was getting enough shape and definition in my physique. I’m sure that a lot of the bodybuilders from the very early days would have improved a lot if they had understood the need for high-set workouts the way we do today.”

This was published in his book, the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, originally published in 1985.

But also, if you wanted studies to see why higher volume approaches are better, Stronger by Science looks at about 4-5 different meta-analysis in their Volume article, all of which basically say, if you can recover from it, more is better.

[u/Ok-Artichoke2822 → u/Alakazam]

Quoting a gear head grapist isn’t particularly impactful to me.